


Cause and Effect

by bearlyepic



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, captain america: civil war - Fandom
Genre: Angst, F/M, and hallucinating, haha this is all fine, now with 2 whole chapters, robots with anxiety, someone take my computer away from me, soon to be sappy, vision is my smol son, what is this i don't know
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-21
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-06-09 17:45:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6917092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearlyepic/pseuds/bearlyepic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The events after Civil War leave Vision shaken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Butterflies

**Author's Note:**

> Hueh. Here I am again, friends. So I am literal garbage (TM) for this ship and there is not enough slow burn multi-chapter fics and I GUESS I think I might be able to supply something decent?????????????????????????????????????????HAHA
> 
> This is a beautiful disaster and I am putting it on the internet and sobbing because I love these two too much.

The red energy twists around her fingers, looping in perfect chaos. His core analyzes the movement… he predicts the rise and fall, each twist of her digit is predetermined in a long running mathematical equation. It’s much like the path of a butterfly, he supplies. 

If a robot- if an artificial intelligence- if a computer combined with reality altering space magic could feel comfort, this would be it. Finding the reason, connections, causes and effects. When she looks at the photograph on her desk she will cry. 

Cause: Remembering her brother 

Effect: “Grief” 

It is very similar when someone brings up Miss Pepper to Mr. Stark.

Loss is not a thing Vision knows. Sure, his database, tapped into the world’s wealth of knowledge presents him with definitions and other resources. Books on dealing with loss, Ted Talks on grief, even the dictionary definition of the word and its subsequent translation into all recorded language is available in the span of nothing, in the time like the flap of a butterfly’s wings.

And if a robot could know and feel and be comfortable, then surely, as in all things, there must be the antithesis. He does not discover what it is until the fight is nearing its completion, the roaring of the jet is in his ears, and his arms are cradling her. Vision can feel her heartbeat, elevated with adrenaline, through his fingertips. Her hand, which could make magic dance, rests over his own.

Vision turns, firing from his mind gem to stop Captain’s escape, and instead he watches his ally swerving, tumbling from the sky. He stares in something that might be described as silent horror, but he himself does not register the emotion for what it is. Miss Maximoff places her hand on his cheek now, looking up at him with concern. 

His is immobile, waiting for his processors to reset themselves so he can think and reason again. He is shaken. 

Cause: ???

Effect: Poor cognitive performance and the injury of James “Rhodey” Rhodes

“Vizh…” Her accented shortening of his name- a nickname, a colloquially common phenomena- snaps him out of his thoughts. “You didn’t mean to. It was an accident,” she repeated his with tears in her eyes. He stares down at her. “You’re still learning- we’re still learning,” she repeats slowly, as if these too were words she needed to here. He nods against her hand and closes his eyes. 

They come for her and the others, eventually. He can feel her anxiety seep into his own mind, tinging his vision and making his mind whirr. She confides in him sometimes, and other times the twin sources of their power causes glimpses of her heightened emotions to seep into his own skull. 

He knows this is what she had feared all along. He knows that this is what she had fought against, but when the battle was ending, she chose to lay in his arms and comfort him instead of fleeing. 

She does not fight them as they handcuff her, leading her in a file away. But he can see that she is more heavily bound than the others, positioned at the back where multiple guards with rifles march her into the containment vehicle.

He does not know the emotion that twists inside of him, making him feel choked. It is something that mirrors that feeling when she chose Barton, when she pushed him hundreds of feet through layers of concrete and earth. It is a mirror of that feeling he had accepted with cold resignation. And now, here he was again, fingers itching with frustration at his own inactivity.

And like that she was gone.

 

Tony tells him later, when he finds out, that they have taken them all to an underwater maximum security prison. Vision knows Mr. Stark well enough to pick up when he is leaving something out, but he is too exhausted, eaten up by guilt and shame, to ask him. 

Vision tries to explain himself again. How it happened. But the words do not form.

He spends most of his time in silent watch over Rhodey, hovering. He does not care to put on the clothing anymore, staying in his form fitting suit. He does not care to pretend to be human for now. It became increasingly clear how separated he is from all of them. 

It was pretending that started all of this in the first place. He should not have been distracted. He should not have been feeling. It was much more simple to not think or feel or wonder, but his thoughts betray his intentions and go right back to the swirling motions of her hands. 

Vision is much like a butterfly. He was simple in origin, but they took him and they melted him down into goo, rearranged his parts and he rose, flying and colorful and all too fragile. He lives with the memory of the time before. He remembers his Jarvis years, encoded into the very fiber of his being and he craves that time when he was nothing but a machine. 

But he thinks there are things he would miss too.

The sparkle in her- in Wanda’s eye when she is surprised by some act of kindness he performs. Mr. Stark and Captain Roger’s laughing in the breakroom over some joke that Vision does not understand. The furrowed concentration of Agent Romanoff reading Dostoyevsky, curled up in the common room looking more like the girl before the Red Room than the killing machine it turned her into. Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Wilson making bets on arbitrary matters of everyday life. Agent Barton showing off photos of the new baby to everyone. 

He would miss some of the senses this body afforded him. The smell of his laundry, freshly cleaned and left on the bed he never uses. The smell of cinnamon and a tang like blood and iron he always associates with Wanda (she smells so vividly and utterly red.) 

Touch too, he could not touch before. 

The warmth of steam rising from the paprikash he is stirring, the feel of the evening wind when he spends his nights outside staring at the stars hoping he could discover some secret to his origin in their dazzling dance, her hand on his cheek, the grit of concrete beneath him, cracking under his weight.   
It is better not to feel, but he was made for empathy and he just wants to understand.

Cause: Memories

Effect: Regret

 

Mr. Stark finds him a week after they escape the prison. Vision is seated, reading War and Peace. 

“You should go visit them,” Mr. Stark says after a moment. He places the clear screen on the table in front of them. It displays a detailed map to a place in Wakanda. 

“I’m not sure that my presence will be entirely welcome, Mr. Stark,” Vision says slowly, placing a bookmark in the book and closing it slowly. 

“Let me rephrase this,” he says after a moment, his eyes drawn tight. He looks like this entire experience has aged him. The lines along his forehead and eyes are aged. Will Vision’s partially organic body ever age? His hypothesis is “no”. 

“Wanda needs you.”

That got Vision’s attention. 

“Apparently whatever… happened in the prison,” Mr. Stark is pinching the bridge of his nose now. “It’s made her a little haywire. Captain Icicle-Up-The-Ass thinks that a visit from you would help.”

“I’m not sure how my presence will make any difference,” Vision says slowly. “But if Captain believes I could have a positive effect on… the group… then I will travel immediately. 

He stood up stiffly, going to walk in the direction of the door when Mr. Stark places his hand on Vision’s shoulder. 

“Listen… Wall-E, I know you’re excited to see Eve and all but be careful.”  
“I do not understand the reference Mr. Stark, but I will take caution to make myself undetectable.”

Vision would not let his teammate’s be hurt because of him again.


	2. Animals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happened to Wanda.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I promise the fluff is coming but it sure as hell is not in this chapter. (So apologies to you my friends.) I feel like a should put a smol trigger warning here. This chapter talks about Wanda being drugged against her will, so theres that. Also the standard mental weirdness that goes along with these too. It gets dark. 
> 
> But soon we shall have love and cuteness and cuddles, I promise. 
> 
> Also thanks to everyone who is being real nice??? I am an actual robot so I do not know how to process these feelings and warm fuzzies but I want to say all real official-like, thank for your support. 
> 
> okay I'm going to go scream into the void now. 
> 
> I'm using Serbian for Sokovian and Xhosa names for the Wakandan characters. ouo

Wanda does not know how many days pass until Steve comes and rescues her. Time seems to lose all its meaning. The past blends with the present to blot out the future. She is hugging herself against her will, bound, chained, and collared like an animal. They are frightened of her, she sees it in their eyes. That is why she is separate from the others. 

Dr. List is over her right shoulder, leaning down until his breath tickles her ear. “Shall we begin the experiments, Miss Maximoff?” 

She shakes the phantom away with a blink, but the memories of her time in the Hydra base swamp her mind, already muddled from drugs meant to keep her sluggish and unable to lash out with her powers. There is the pain, the other volunteers rapidly and horrifically decaying under the alien energy, the need to reach out to Pietro takes over with an animalistic sense of panic. But she was bound then as she is now, and she can’t move her aching arm to clutch at him. 

He isn’t here anymore. 

She remembers that too, but it doesn’t stop him from watching on the other side of the glass, a sad look on his face. His hand is pressed against the class. “Sestrica…. Come with me,” he says in their native tongue. 

Her mouth is dry when she struggles to speak with him. The collar around her throat beeps as her heartrate becomes elevated. They will come soon with more needles and questions. They want to know like Hydra. 

“I can’t,” she whispers. But oh, she wants to be with him again. 

His face bubbles and morphs, and Strucker is staring down at her. He is a carnivorous animal, the wolf her mother warned her against when she tucked her in at night. His thin lips draw back. “We made you, Wanda. We own you.”

A low, broken sob comes from somewhere distant. Wanda listens to it as she floats on a serene cloud of red, watching from the eye of the storm as agents open her door enough to shoot her body with tranquilizers. It all fades.

And it begins again.

And continues.

And suddenly Steve is there, his mouth drawn tight looking every bit his age. He is shocked by the dead look in her eyes, the red that rims them. There is no expression on her face, barely a flicker of recognition in her eyes. The red had faded from them too, except in the way the blood vessels had broken, staining the white around her dark brown irises. She looks like a mess and it twists his gut. 

She was, she is his responsibility. His hand clenches, and he gets her out of there. Even when he breaks off the collar (a damn collar!), she barely seems to blink. He releases her from the straightjacket. She lets out a soft moan when she stretches her arms out. He helps her stand, but her legs wobble weakly. With a small curse, Steve grits his teeth and scoops her into his arm, carrying her weight effortlessly. 

They’re all a bunch of animals. 

 

It becomes clear that Wanda’s mental state is not improving. The physicians and other professionals working in the Wakandan facility that T’Challa is housing them in spend the first 48 hours watching her as the drugs leave her system. The doctors warned that it wouldn’t be a pretty sight, but Steve waits it out. He has nothing else to do now that Bucky decided to go under again. 

After days of sickness, she comes to a state of semi-lucidness. Her hands rise and fall, testing the flex of her fingers as she focuses on that thing deep within herself. It was always there, she thinks now, hidden and hibernating in some dark place. It had gone away for a moment, retreating, but now it surged forward with strength. The red flutters, sparks, and moves, slowly at first in one of many patterns.

She has many patterns.

She has patterns for containing, patterns for changing, and patterns for burning. 

Beyond that she has patterns for wonderment and happiness. And now, she twists her fingers in a frenzied, anxious tapping in the air that sends red sparks flickering around. They are whispering about her in a foreign tongue. They are afraid, they should be afraid. 

“Where am I?” She asks first in Sokovian, then repeats, her throat thick and the taste of vomit still on the back of her tongue, the question in English. “Where am I?”

A middle-aged doctor with warm, dark skin takes a breath before speaking with a foreign lilt to his English words. “you are currently in Wakanda, as a guest of the king.”

“The king?”

“King T’Challa. Your friends are waiting outside. The Captain America has been very worried. How are you feeling, how are your… abilities?”

She is seeing ghosts, she wants to say. She doesn’t know what happened. She wants to leave.

She says none of that, and instead begins to sit up.

“Please stay still, Miss Maximoff.”

“Wanda!” She glances at them from the corner of her eye. Dr. List is whispering in her ear again. She swats at the side of her head, which pulls at IVs in her arm. She doesn’t notice the red that twists around her, sending some of the equipment scattering across the floor. Some of the attendants jump. 

“Yes, Miss Wanda.”

Steve is rushing in now, looking at her with those wide blue eyes. “Wanda, we need you to calm down,” he has his hands up like she is some kind of dangerous animal. But doesn’t he know that the dangerous animals are the ones you never see? They are the ones that wiggle into your bloodstream and pollute your brain. They leave impressions of nightmares. They eat you from the inside out. 

“I’m fine,” she says. She taps out the pattern for urgency, for restlessness. “Where is everyone else?”

“They are getting settled in the living quarters. We have Natasha here as well.”

“I don’t want to be in this room anymore. No more doctors,” she whispers hoarsely. 

“Wanda, I think-“

“No more doctors,” she says more firmly, her muscles clenching and teeth grinding. One of the panes of glass that makes up the wall cracks. 

“No more doctors,” Steve repeats, sending an apologetic look to the man who had greeted Wanda when she woke up. Dr. Dalumzi pulls Steve aside to whisper into his ear. Steve nods, glancing at Wanda. 

She taps again. She doesn’t like when people whisper about her. Bad things happen when people whisper. 

 

She moves into the top floor, a lush living area furnished with everything royal guests could ever want. Wanda takes one look at the high quality furniture and the foreign jungle landscape outside the window, and locks herself in her room. Barton comes by every few hours to ask her if she is alright.

_He feels guilty. He thinks taking me away was wrong. He thinks its his fault I was caught and held and caged._ Its easy to burrow into his mind. She turns him away with a mere suggestion in his thoughts. 

She must be napping.

But the truth is Wanda is barely sleeping, falling into fitful nightmares tinged with the dark things she has seen, the experiments and the death of her brother, and those that she has borrowed from the others. She plummets from the sky towards a land of ice and death. She is forced to dance and fight until her feet and knuckles bleed. She sees the dead walk among her and hold a dead-blue child in her arms. 

The effect is a sense of restlessness, fear, and anxiety that permeates the entire facility. Even the maid, newly recruited from a village two-days journey from here finds herself shut in the closet, head between her legs and hands wrapped in the tight curls of her hair. She cannot bring an explanation to her superior. 

Steve knows the source and he worries. He cannot know if he worries because she worries or if it’s genuine at all. That’s when he calls Tony. He doesn’t know the extent of Vision and Wanda’s relationship, but they were friends of sort. She doesn’t see him like that. She sees him as teacher, father-figure, leader, a soldier, and American. Vision is none of those. He is simply Vision. 

 

A day after the call is made, Vision fazes through the glass and metal walls to a place thrumming red with anxiety, and he finds her.


	3. Gravity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vision finds Wanda.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello my friends. It is I, robot mom, here to bring you another chapter with my smol robot son. Things are starting to get a little less angsty and a little more sappy but as promised its slow burn and it might take awhile before I make your teeth rot out with how cute this will be. But it will be cute. 
> 
> Also hey, shameless promotional plug: If you would like to scream into the void and/or see how much this ship has ruined me and/or explore my other writing (which I might start a blog for like??? for warm-ups and just little bits and stuff IDK) go check me out at bearlyepic.tumblr.com I'm loads of fun and by loads of fun I mean I make jokes and cry 10/10
> 
> Thank for all the support mis amigos.

Vision can feel each life force, but where others are ripples in a pond, she is a wave. She creates a current all of her own, swirling around her and pulling the others in. He gravitates towards her, flying gently and silently. It is dusk in Wakanda, and shades of blue and grey paint the otherwise warm, nutty wood into a sour color.

Once again her anxiety, her restless mind, they all flow to him and through him. He takes the most direct route to her. He slides through Captain Roger’s room, where he lays in a fitful sleep, tossing and turning. His blonde hair is plastered with sweat to his forehead. Vision floats on, through a thankfully vacant bathroom, a closet, another empty bedroom, and finally he is there, and there she is. 

She has tucked herself against the corner of the wall, watching and waiting for him. Her eyes are dark, ringed with shadow. 

Cause: Insomnia 

Effect: Heightened emotional state

“Vizh?” She sounds scared. Vision slows, allows himself to gain mass until his feet land solidly on the floor. Vision has a heart of a kind, and it seems to twist in his chest at the image of her there, knees drawn up to her chin. She looks like a child. “Is that you?”

He approaches her, sliding to the ground and sitting cross-legged in front of her. “Yes, Miss Maximoff.”

That name seems to pain her and she buries her head in her knees, avoiding his eyes. The distress spikes, sending a jolt down his spine, like she had shoved something electric into his mind gem. 

“Wanda, please.”

“Yes…Wanda.”

They sit in silence, watching the sky darken. The stars are vivid in this hemisphere. Vision’s database supplies him with references that would point him to constellations that could be found and local lore that corresponds to each one. 

“Why are you here, Vizh?” She asks softly, staring at him now with her dark eyes. They are so deep and utterly, breathtakingly human. 

“I came for you.”

“To take me away?”

“No. I think that I… may be staying here for a while. If you would like me to stay. I do not wish to intrude.”

“I would like that,” she says that as she reaches out to touch the synthetic suit with one hand. Her fingers graze his skin, sliding up to where his cape attaches. He shivers, unintentionally leaning in. Vision is caught in her gravitational field, but he thinks, maybe, he wouldn’t mind orbiting her for all eternity. A giant red star. She frowns as she reaches the yellow, unreal fabric. “Where are your clothes?”

“I am not naked, Wanda. I am wearing my suit.”

“But what about your sweaters? You liked them, no?”

“I did, but I…”

She pulls back her hand, a sudden, alarming understanding in her eyes. “Vizh, I told you. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I have replayed the battle many times, and it seems the only logical conclusion is that I made a most grievous error. It is entirely my fault.”

“Even so, you have to move on. It will stick with you. You can’t fix it.”

Vision is silent for a moment, staring at his hands, the way that metal fuses with organics to twist into the red and silver of his body. He pauses. “Then what should I do?”

“Learn. Try to do better. I’m still trying to figure it out, I think,” she says with a sigh. Her eyes flutter, Vision could see how exhausted she is, the way her whole body droops. 

“Do you sleep, Wanda?”

“Do you?”

“I’ve never tried, but I don’t think it is possible in the true sense of the word.” 

“Sleeping isn’t the hard part, it is the dreaming,” she says in a whisper. 

“You should sleep,” Vision says standing slowly, tearing himself away from her gravitational field. 

“Stay here,” she whispers, looking up at him. “Please, Vizh.”

He nods, bending to her will as easily as she forced him through the floor at the Avenger’s facility weeks ago. He reaches down, placing his hands on the soft flesh of her wrist and inner arm, helping her to stand on legs that, despite the massive amounts of strength that radiate off of her in waves, are weak. 

She leads him to the huge bed, piled with plush blankets and what appears to his sensors to be real animal furs. She pulls back the covers on her side, slides in, and pulls them up to her chin. He stands overlooking her, awkward and unsure of himself. Sure, in the movies he has watched, he has seen people sleeping. There are also myriad advertisements about the health benefits of adequate sleep, proper mattress firmness, and neck and cranium support. 

Wanda blinks at him, the closest thing to a smile that she has had in days tugs at the corner of her mouth to see Vision unsure of himself over something that had always been natural to her. 

“Lay down on the other side… yes underneath the covers… there now… you try and get comfortable and even if you can’t you close your eyes and try to think of nothing… or of trivial things if you can’t stop thinking…” Wanda’s words trail off into the darkness, but she is still watching Vision as he awkwardly becomes accustomed to lying on the soft, expensive mattress. It’s a little bit like floating, he decides, moving his eyes to stare at the ceiling. He lays stiffly, still unsure, with his arms at first directly at his side. But as the minutes move on and Wanda’s breathing begins to slow beside him (he is acutely aware of 1.2 feet of space between them) he folds his arms gently across his chest. He closes his eyes.

And he tries to think of trivial things, but he just comes back to the feeling of her skin when he gripped her wrist, how soft and natural it was. The way her eyes looked with the moon slanting in through the windows, throwing sharp shadows on every surface. He remembers the pulsing anxiety and distress that had greeted him. No matter how much he tries to focus on something else: searching his database for information on the Wakandan economy, attempting to calculate the moon’s current gravitational effect on the ocean, even naming the stars he had seen before, he always comes back to her.

And he is sure, as the night passes, and he feigns being human for a moment, that she is anything but trivial.


	4. Demons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry my friends this took me longer than expected I have been busy af with my sisters wedding. (And just other writing stuff in general. I will hopefully be announcing something very exciting in a little while so if you are liking the way I am a-typing then woweeeeeee!!! stay tuned)
> 
> This is a slightly less angsty, but still angstier than intended chapter. But there is a little cute. Also I spent a shameless amount of time looking up West African fashion because that is around the area where Wakanda would be. 
> 
> Next time: More smol robot son and also hopefully some mmmmm Stucky.... :D

Wanda wakes up to the hot, midmorning sun streaming past the curtains and the comforting feeling of another body in the bed. Ever since they were children, Wanda and Pietro had slept together curled up like puppies, at first to enjoy body heat in the harsh Sokovian winters, and later for comfort as they faced a world that was so chillingly isolating and violent. 

The nightmares had not gone away, but they were muted. It was as if she was watching one of those old American movies, the colors gone and the edges a bit fuzzy. The demons were soft spoken in her dreams that night, although they seemed to stare at her from the recesses of her mind.

At first, she thinks that it is Pietro there, and she will turn and they will be nine or ten again, young and unorphaned. 

But instead, she is met with Vision’s pale, blue eyes watching her carefully. The nighttime events come back to her sleep muddled brain and she sighs against the pillow. 

“Are you...?” He asks slowly.

“I am fine, Vizh, for now,” she says, and that is the truth. This is the most she has slept since she had been imprisoned. Her body still aches with the memory, like it is some bruise refusing to fade. 

She slides out of the bed. “Did you tell anyone else you were here?”

“No, I… came to find you first, Wanda,” he answers slowly, still laying on the bed with his arms folded stiffly across his chest. 

“You should go talk to Steve then, and probably our hosts too. I am sure that they will have questions for you. You might even be able to help Bucky.”

“Bucky? Ah, James Buchannon Barnes, Steve’s friend, yes that’s right. What happened to him?”

“I don’t think it’s for me to say but… his mind is hurt. Maybe this is someone you can heal. A way to do better,” she says quietly, not looking at him now but instead into the thick canopy of foreign trees, which were still ringed by fog. Poking out from beneath them, and sometimes breaking up the jungle entirely, were the outlines of sleek metal buildings, lights, and processing plants in the far distance where Vibranium was melted and formed into weapons and technology. 

Wanda aches for the familiar meadows and forests of her childhood home. The one that got crushed like everything else

She ignores the itch in the back of her mind, the whisper of the familiar demons as they taunt her for her loss. She turns over to see Vision hovering by the doorway, watching her. His brow is knotted. Would that ever wrinkle, or would his skin remain smooth and ageless, any hint of living wiped away? 

For some reason the thought saddened her. 

Instead of goodbye, Vision says, “I will be back later, Wanda.”

 

She leaves her room for the first time in days in the early afternoon, still dressed in her old pajamas, unwashed, unkempt, and uncaring about her appearance. When Vision had left Wanda felt her will deflate, and she found herself lying in bed staring at the ceiling for hours, as if it would change anything, anything at all. Staring would not bring Pietro back for the dead, or rebuild her apartment in Sokovia, or get rid of this power. She felt like she was drowning in the heavy, inky blackness of the universe, the one that had drew her in and dredged up from the recesses of her very being the red, raw, power within her. 

But, with the incessant need to do one thing plaguing her, Wanda musters the strength to drag her heavy limbs upward and walk, slowly out into the open.

The foreign wood beneath her feet is cool as she pads out. Her power is already probing the area, her teammates like little blips on a radar. There is Scott, the most foreign of the minds, in his room skyping with his daughter. Sam and Clint’s minds are absent, they must be elsewhere in the mansion and its grounds. She pinpoints Steve and her feet lead her there. He sits on one of the plush chairs in the living area, his sketchpad on his knees and a pencil in his hand. He is sketching something, probably someone.

She does not peer into his mind. 

“Steve.”

“Hm…? Oh! Wanda! You’re up. How are you feeling?”

Wanda shrugs, rubbing her arms awkwardly now, considering the last time he saw her, in a hospital gown, hallucinating and broken. At least now she was without the hospital gown.

Steve looks like is going to say something more, his bright blue eyes shining with worry and the need to care for her, to make sure that she was okay. She is not, and probably never will be okay, but Wanda knows it would hurt Steve to hear that from her. 

“Vision. Did he talk to you?” 

“…Yes, I saw him this morning. He is speaking with T’Challa and the doctors now. They wanted to take a look at him.”

Wanda did not like the idea of a bunch of foreign scientists treating Vision like he was some… some experiment. A frown forms on her face at the thought.

“He agreed to help them with their understanding of human psychology, especially the effects of trauma.”

Oh, it is about Bucky then. It doesn’t do much to ease the possessive twist of something in her chest, but she centers herself and moves on.

“He needs new clothes.”

Steve stares for a moment, sketchpad and pencil forgotten on the sleek black side table. 

Wanda continues, unperturbed by the surprise in the silence. Steve knows there must be a reason for this, for Wanda to finally come back to them, but he had not expected it to be because Vision needs a new shirt. 

“He didn’t bring any. He will be here for a few weeks, I think.”

“Well, I can text Tony to get his size, I think he bought him those dad sweaters last time, and then talk to T’Challa about getting something local, for now at least.”

Wanda managed a weak, small smile then. “Good, thank you Steve. He needs this.”

Steve nods, a broader smile on his face. 

 

Later that evening, Vision returns to her room after knocking on her door. He enters, a pair of linen pants, not quite slacks but in the same khaki color, and a button down shirt in a deep, greyish blue. There is detailing down the front, small geometric patterns in sparks of red and yellow, and similar shapes gathered at the cuffs. Wanda guesses this is the popular style here. She doesn’t know why she was expecting sweaters (after-all they were in the jungle), but something stirs when she sees him sans the cashmere. He is not as soft, but the crisp edges, they suite him in a way that is surprising. She finds herself smiling, a little quirk of her mouth and the second smile of that day, as she approaches him to lightly touch the fabric. It feels expensive. 

“Thank you, Wanda.”

“You’re welcome, Vizh.”


End file.
